From some weeks from now when Hollywood meets to present the 2012 Academy Awards, the company that famously lend its name to the venue would be tackling financial difficulty. Last week, Kodak, the name behind many a photographic moment in our lives, succumbed to bankruptcy. Photography is still very much alive. But Kodak is in trouble.

Smart thinking

Kodak's predicament is a case of missed opportunities. The best example of that is not Kodak's pioneering development of digital photography, but its overlooking the commercial possibility the format represented. As has been reported, the decline of Kodak in photography started with competition's inroads into the US market, thanks to Kodak's own complacency in digital photography and the subsequent uphill task it faced in preserving market share. Whatever the actual causes for Kodak's decline, the startling fact is that what went bankrupt is a company having no shortage of technological innovations and patents. It was an absence of smart market thinking that cost Kodak the day.

Viewed differently, the real story is not Kodak's bankruptcy. Photographs being so precious to everyone and Kodak being synonymous with photography, its decline touches in a fashion that the trouble at Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers or General Motors didn't. There's something Kodak in your photo albums, old and new. That's what just faded. However, even such intimacy does not make Kodak immune to business fortunes. If you aren't smart enough, you lose. So is being smart all that there is? That's the real question in the Kodak story for the technology it pioneered is still alive as is photography. What nosedived is Kodak. Equally, another question surfaces — how much has photography changed, courtesy the digital format Kodak wasn't smart enough to capitalise on?

Superior images

My understanding is that the revolution digital photography brought about has been in the realm of camera size and what all you can do with an image. It hasn't improved your eye for photography. It shrank the camera, popularised photography and improved our chances for better image. For instance, where you planned thoroughly and clicked one image before, you now click several and choose the best. That selected image can be further fiddled with, for it is made of pliable pixels, not irreversible photo-chemical reaction.

Once the post-produced image has been frozen, it can be shared; mailed, printed and copied — there are more applications out there that I don't know of. Question is: Has that radically altered the quality of photographs at the world's annual such short-lists of the best? Or is better photography now a product of better chance in the sense of mathematical probability, because cameras are more these days; they are more self-correcting and link up with computers for greater versatility? With all that, are we creating images that are startlingly, phenomenally superior, visually, from what were produced by chemical reaction on film? To me, this thought is the Kodak moment in Kodak's bankruptcy.

Real innovation

Kodak's is a situation that faces humanity in many fields. Take something as personal as friendships. Social networking sites were hailed as visionaries bringing people together. Like digital photography's impact, that is absolutely correct. Each one of us found more friends. However, the more friends we made, the more plastic seemed friendship.

Or as the US Presidential elections, the Arab Spring and many such well-aimed efforts showed, the real use of social networking sites is something more purposeful.

As this multiplier medium matures, we find that the old, real friend — a friend at hand — is as solid as ever. What if we had cast him or her into the human equivalent of bankruptcy because profits lay in the multiplier? A great photograph of something is as timeless as a great friend. There is a Kodak story, thus, in every field. It is a story of old wine in new bottle for seven billion-world. Not that this exonerates Kodak of blame for its downfall.

The irony of Kodak is that as iconic manufacturer of photographic film and an icon of the film era (and less so of digital age), it was actually in the very distribution/application space that finally booted it out. Kodak's fate reminds of VHS giving way to VCD and DVD, except a legendary company shifted to bankruptcy with it.

If people like me confuse Kodak with photography, that's because it is a successful brand. But yet again — did the improved content of video prove as smashing as the shift from VHS to DVD? Exploring such angles is not difficult — your mobile phone, which converges all the world's wisdom and images onto your palm (and played a role in weakening Kodak), will easily help you. Such are the Kodak moments in Kodak's troubled times. It's photography. It's also thoughts about what's happening to us.

(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. >blfeedback@thehindu.co.in )

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